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The Liberty Times Editorial: Meeting was another Chinese trap
In what has been billed as the first formal meeting between Taiwan’s and China’s top officials in charge of cross-strait affairs since 1949, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) met Taiwan Affairs Office Minister Zhang Zhijun (張志軍) on Tuesday last week in Nanjing, China, with the two men addressing one another by their formal titles. Some people in Taipei have been going out of their way to raise a big fanfare about a possible meeting between President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and this prospect has drawn a lot of attention to the meeting between Wang and Zhang.
Although the legislature had the foresight to draw some red lines before Wang’s departure, Taiwan is sure to pay a price for this meeting with his Chinese counterpart.
Face-to-face talks between high-ranking government officials mark a departure from the long-established practice of using semi-governmental organizations — the Straits Exchange Foundation and China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) — as proxy contacts.
The Ma administration, accustomed as it is to wishful thinking, sees this development as a success for its cross-strait policy of “mutual non-denial” and it has been boasting about how the meeting was “of great significance” and “marked the start of a new chapter in cross-strait relations.”
In China, ever since Xi took over as president, he has kept making moves designed to urge Taiwan to engage in political negotiations. In an informal meeting with former vice president Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) in October last year, Xi said: “The longstanding political division between the two sides will have to be eventually resolved step by step as it should not be passed on generation after generation.”
Last week’s meeting between Wang and Zhang was the first step in a game where the goal is to further China’s “unification” agenda by means of government-to-government negotiations.
In the face of widespread opposition to political talks among Taiwanese, Ma at first responded to Chinese pressure for political talks by saying that the two sides should talk about business and economics first and leave politics till later. After he started his second term in office last year, Ma’s incompetent performance dragged his approval rate as low as 9 percent in opinion polls. Keen to leave some kind of legacy from his time in office, he has been making a last-ditch effort to achieve something with his China policy. Ma still clings to the goal of “eventual unification” and envisions a meeting between himself and Xi, and that is the setting in which last week’s meeting between Wang and Zhang took place.
Given this context, the Wang-Zhang meeting and any ensuing official negotiations are sure to harm Taiwan’s interests. Signs of this can already be seen. The current pattern of developments reflects China’s strategy of setting up a framework, luring the other side into its trap and then breaking down resistance by offering bogus concessions in exchange for real ones. The format of the Wang-Zhang meeting created the appearance of a “breakthrough in cross-strait relations,” which made the Ma government — driven by its need for favors from China — eager to take part, and also attracted the attention of international media. China started off by making the minor concession of having its minister address the other by his official title, while actually undermining the authority of the Mainland Affairs Council. Nevertheless, Ma and his government prefer to delude themselves by celebrating China’s apparent gesture of goodwill.
Although China’s handling of the meeting created the appearance of flexibility, its standpoints remain clear and unchanged. Chinese government statements and media reports still referred to Wang as “Taiwan’s mainland affairs chief,” and, as usual, after the official meeting was over they announced that the two sides had “arrived at several positive common understandings.”
In recent years China has repeatedly talked about “common understandings” and “consensuses” as part of its efforts to promote unification with Taiwan. In the same vein, the cross-strait forum on media prospects that was held in Beijing in December last year came up with a six-point “joint initiative.” While the deluded heads of Taiwanese media organizations endorsed this “joint initiative” amid the contrived atmosphere of the forum, it stirred up a good deal of controversy in Taiwan.
The Wang-Zhang meeting was held behind closed doors, so that even though no memorandum or communique was released after the meeting, China has still been able to inject its desired content. The Ma government is so keen on arranging a meeting between Ma and Xi that it has had to remain silent about China’s misrepresentations.
Precedents for this tactic were set long ago. When negotiations took place between the foundation and ARATS in Hong Kong in 1992, China insisted on inserting questions and implications about “one China,” but the two sides did not achieve a consensus. Then-foundation chairman Koo Chen-fu (辜振甫) wrote in his memoir that there was no such thing as the so-called “1992 consensus.” The ridiculous thing is that this non-existent consensus has become the basis of the Ma government’s China policy.
However, what was false to begin with can never become true and that is why Wang’s full official title and the nation’s official title — the Republic of China (ROC) — could only be mentioned by Wang himself when he was paying his respects at the tomb of ROC founder Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) in Nanjing.
Taiwan has already paid a price in a number of ways for the Wang-Zhang meeting: The Ma government is trying to please China by revising the course outlines for certain subjects in Taiwan’s senior-high schools by reintroducing a mandatory China-oriented historical perspective, and Wang complied with China’s restrictions by avoiding three “unmentionable” topics — human rights, democracy and the national title. Ma himself says that cross-strait affairs are not international relations. It is easy to see how willing the Ma administration is to walk into China’s traps.
The reality of the past six years is that Ma’s government has not performed well in any aspect of domestic or foreign policy, be it business, economics, welfare or anything else. Given this government’s poor performance, how could anyone in Taiwan trust it as it forges ahead with its China policies and engages in formal political negotiations with Chinese authorities, which have never relinquished their aim of annexing Taiwan?
Only the public can limit the damage. Having been voted into office by Taiwanese, legislators should do their duty by sternly reviewing the Wang-Zhang meeting and everything else that Wang did during his trip to China. The legislature has refused to rubber stamp the cross-strait agreement on trade in services that the foundation and ARATS signed in Shanghai in June last year, and this shows that as long as the legislature sticks to its guns and citizens keep an eye on what is going on, they can make it hard for Ma’s government to get away with recklessness.
Notably, many observers have drawn attention to the question of establishing procedural legitimacy and a legal basis for negotiating and signing agreements with China, and these things will become essential and must be put into practice now that Taiwan and China are entering the stage of official political negotiations. The best way to limit the damage to Taiwan, and to develop China policies that give Taiwanese peace of mind, would be to teach Ma and his government a hard lesson in the elections that are scheduled for the end of this year — ideally by booting Ma’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) officials out of office and voting in Democratic Progressive Party representatives.
Translated by Julian Clegg
source: Taipei Times
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